Research perspectives

The Innsbruck Doctoral College "Gender and Gender Relations in Transformation: Spaces -Relations - Representations" investigates transformations of gender and gender relations in their historical, spatial and reciprocal relationships, conditions and effects.

In order to examine transformation processes in the framework of SPACES, RELATIONS and REPRESENTATIONS the college fosters and includes new and more recent research perspectives that form an intersection with critical gender studies, such as postcolonial studies, disability, queer and refugee studies, critical masculinity studies, science and technology studies, urban studies and cultural studies.

The theoretical approaches investigating spaces, relations and representations, developed in various disciplines, become productive in an interdisciplinary exchange for the investigation of the transformation processes of gender and gender relations, e.g. when the analysis of relational inequality is expanded to include aspects of space or when literary and/or scientific-historical analyses of the representation of gender introduce other categories of the social.

SPACES are understood as geographical and especially as social and cultural coordinates of action and events, but also as physical places of exclusion, inclusion and transition, acting as borders, barriers and facilitators of participation.

RELATIONS, in turn, are understood as connections between real persons, actors and agents. Additionally, relations describe the connections between individual subjectification and social positioning, which can strengthen but also weaken old and new inequalities, hierarchies and border-demarcating processes.

REPRESENTATIONS are defined as meaningful, legitimizing and delegitimizing systems of symbols, discursive formations and literary or media narratives, which have the potential to create, stabilize but also transform violent forms of subjectivation, social relations and knowledge orders. 

The Innsbruck Doctoral College hereby focuses on the past and present of successful, unsuccessful, unfortunate or even failed attempts and transformative social struggles and movements.